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Liam Carey reviews
Cruelty Without Beauty
Cooking Vinyl
- Year: 2002
- Rating: 7/10
- Cat. No: COOK CD245
Track listing:
- 1. Darker Times
2. Monoculture
3. Le Grand Guignol
4. The Night
5. Last Chance
6. Together Alone
7. Desperate
8. Whatever It Takes
9. All Out Of Love
10. Sensation Nation
11. Caligula Syndrome
12. On An Up
Seminal early 80s synthpop duo finally reform after almost 20 years. Indie record label originally associated with the work of Billy Bragg releases the resulting album. That is the unlikely scenario accompanying Cruelty Without Beauty, Soft Cell‘s first set of new songs since This Last Night In Sodom in 1984. During the intervening years, Marc Almond and Dave Ball have occasionally collaborated (most notably on several tracks from Almond’s 1991 highwatermark solo effort The Tenement Symphony), but only now can the “will they ever reform Soft Cell?” question be laid to rest.
As comebacks go, this is a pretty dignified return, if not quite as triumphant as some might have hoped. Most of Soft Cell’s trademark sensibilities are here; Almond is as lucid, lyrical, sleazy and troubled as ever, while the song titles tell their own tale; a mix of the billboard and the theatrical, the defiant and the tragic. Youthful hedonism has turned to bittersweet desperation for Almond’s protagonists; battered, bruised and dazed by the endless persuit of pleasure and glamour in all the wrong places, their disillusionment turns to both the world around them and their own mortality. The likes of Darker Times, Last Chance, Monoculture and Desperate spell out these characters’ concerns over a world of mediocrity, a society bereft of grand gestures and chronically lacking in diversity.
Such sentiments, and often incisive as well as witty commentary, prove to be Cruelty Without Beauty’s strongest suit, since in musical terms the album is surprisingly one-paced and equally one-dimensional. With the fabulously titled Caligula Syndrome excepted, the 2002 model Soft Cell fail to clothe these superior lyrics in either substantial arrangements or memorable tunes.
All 12 compositions have been studiously crafted in a verse/verse/chorus/verse/bridge/chorus manner prevalent in the era of the duo’s initial brush with pop stardom, but less commonplace in the anything-goes music scene of today. But if the soaring melodies and dynamic production aren’t quite up to the task, as is somtimes the case here, it all ends up sounding flat.
Together Alone and Whatever It Takes are affecting adult pop confections, the last throw of loaded dice for 30-something lovers; one a thankful gasp of relief that desire has not deserted them, the other an urgent plea to help stave off the dreaded onset of middle age. Yet neither are in the same league as, for instance, Say Hello Wave Goodbye or Where The Heart Is, songs which were carried as much by their insistent, evocative synth hooklines as the words and vocals.
For while Almond is unquestionably both a finer singer and more authoratitive performer now than in his wild and wilful youth, the modest pitter-patter and plink-plonk of his surroundings here are just too polite, and too mannered, to complement the edginess and grandeur so vividly outlined in the lyrics.
Monoculture, the album’s first single, has an oppressive and addictive mantra-like quality to disguise the absence of a bona-fide tune, but its upside Sensation Nation is simply undercooked and, regrettably, rather naff. Le Grand Guignol and Caligula Syndrome up the camp quotient with some panache, but All Out Of Love is a forgettable slice of generic electro divadom that even latterday Pet Shop Boys would shun for being too bland.
Cruelty Without Beauty is a mixed bag, then. Thankfully, they’ve retained enough of their own identity and resisted the temptation to pander to contemporary music fads and fashions. Almond has rarely been in better form as vocalist or lyricist. It’s good to welcome back a pop act with something worthwhile to say, and the nous to do so with flair.
If only the whole were not less than the sum of its parts.
Review copyright © Liam Carey, 2002. E-mail Liam Carey
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.